Booking Through Thursday: Favorite Unknown

Who’s your favorite author that other people are NOT reading? The one you want to evangelize for, the one you would run popularity campaigns for? The author that, so far as you’re concerned, everyone should be reading–but that nobody seems to have heard of. You know, not JK Rowling, not Jane Austen, not Hemingway–everybody’s heard of them. The author that you think should be that famous and can’t understand why they’re not…

I don’t know that any of the authors I read are particularly obscure, but I do think both Kathleen Norris and Lauren Willig are underrated. Kathleen Norris’s most famous work is The Cloister Walk which had quite a lot of media coverage when it originally came out, but her other works, most notably Dakota: a Spiritual Geography tend to be underplayed, and her poetry is just amazing. She’s one of the authors I would most like to meet. If you like poetry, consider a copy of Little Girls in Church.

Lauren Willig, on the other hand, is prolific and amazing. I don’t know what kind of anti aging product she keeps hidden in her bathroom, nor do I understand where she finds the energy to be an attorney and write historical novels, about a book a year, in hardcover, but as a long-time fan of The Scarlet Pimpernel, I was instantly hooked on Willig’s work when I picked up, The Secret History of the Pink Carnation several years ago. The newest book in the series, The Betrayal of the Blood Lily is new this month.

What I’m Writing: MissMeliss.com

The Brief No… we started our journey on a ship at sea, so lets end it with some “Land Ahoy!” Write about the destination… the port, the land, the horizon, the future… The Excerpt ZOE (sighing) So much has changed, Basil. When we met, you were primarily a scientist, an explorer… then the war happened, […]

The Brief How frustrating is it when you have to deliver something to a deadline, only to realise afterwards what you could have done better. So this is your opportunity to re-do a challenge. Pick any of the previous 26 challenges we’ve done, and write a NEW play following that brief. I bet you’ve […]

The Brief Find an expression, an idiom, a cliche, etc…and use it as a literal impetus for the play. Perhaps write a play about an apple standing at the gate and fighting a doctor? Perhaps a monologue by one patch of grass, envyingly looking at another’s greenness? Perhaps a tree trying desperately to tell a dog […]

What I’m Saying: The Bathtub Mermaid

Description: #Audio. #Blog This will be our year. All of ours. Excerpt: I know I’m not the only person who was more than ready to kick 2018 out the door, and welcome in the promise of a new year. Like a brand new pad of drawing paper, a brand new spiral notebook, a brand new […]

Description: #Audio. #Blog Entenmann’s coffeecake – the taste of home. Excerpt: And more often than not, the dessert would be an Entenmann’s coffeecake. The kind with a crumb topping and pastry cheese filling. That taste, slightly metallic from the foil tray, but always just enough sweetness to temper the strongest of coffees (or the brattiest […]

Description: #Audio. #Blog Musings on trains, real and toy. Excerpt: Train whistles never sound anything but mournful. My friend Stonefish says it’s just the physics of sound, but I think it’s more. I think there’s a romanticism associated with trains that never quite leaves us. Links and References Read the text of this piece at […]